Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Two more to add to the list

There are a couple more names to add to the list of music people who have died recently.David Egan, who has died aged 61, was a singer/songwriter from Lafayette, Louisiana, who was best known in recent years as the keyboard player and one of the vocalists with the Cajun supergroup Lil Band Of Gold. I first became aware of him when I saw Lil Band of Gold play a free show in New Orleans in 2007, which was followed up by an appearance at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish festival the following evening. The band did a tribute to Bobby Charles at the House of Blues in New Orleans in 2010 and the following year they played at the Shepherds Bush Empire when they came over to the UK to play at Lily Allen's wedding. In 2013 I saw them at the Rock 'n' Bowl and David sang Jealous Kind and his own composition Dreamer. They also played at DBA in New Orleans that year (pictured below). His songs were recorded by the likes of Irma Thomas, Marcia Ball, Etta James and Solomon Burke and he was an integral part of the original Lil Band of Gold, along with C C Adcock, Steve Riley and Warren Storm. Like the band itself (now known as the Mama Mama Mamas), he will be sadly missed.

Another singer to have died is Patty Duke, at the age of 69, although she is better known as a TV and film star, beginning at an early age with an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role

of Helen Keller in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. On the strength of that she was given her own TV show, The Patty Duke Show, in which she played identical cousins, type casting perhaps as she suffered from bi-polar disorder. She had a starring role in the 1967 film Valley of The Dolls and had a couple of fair sized hits in the girl group style with Don't Just Stand There and Say Something Funny. She continued to appear regularly on US TV and in movies, but her singing career ended in the late sixties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5eEwwPS9nE